The Future Is History
by Masha Gessen
Summary
The Future Is History tells how Russia, offered an open future in 1991, closed it again, and Masha Gessen tells it through seven lives instead of a chronicle. Four of them were born around the arrival of perestroika, children of the last Soviet generation who came of age in the brief window when the country seemed headed somewhere else: Zhanna, daughter of the reform politician Boris Nemtsov, whose murder within sight of the Kremlin closes the book; Masha, whose entrepreneurial mother rode the new economy up and then into its rigged walls; Seryozha, grandson of the Politburo's great survivor Alexander Yakovlev; and Lyosha, a gay academic from the provinces whose field, gender studies, is legislated out of existence under him. Around the four, Gessen sets three interpreters, the sociologist Lev Gudkov, keeper of the data on Homo Sovieticus, the recurring Soviet personality the surveys kept finding intact; the psychoanalyst Marina Arutyunyan, rebuilding a profession the state had abolished; and the fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin, whose ideas migrate from the margins into state television. The argument the lives carry is Gessen's hardest claim: what returned under Putin is not merely authoritarianism but a recognizably totalitarian society, reconstituted from parts the Soviet Union left in place, above all in the minds the system had made. Gessen, who reported from Moscow for two decades before emigrating in 2013, writes with cold clarity and total command. The book won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and after February 2022 its title stopped sounding like a metaphor.
Historical Context & Significance
Gessen wrote the book after leaving Russia in 2013, when new anti gay legislation threatened their family, and published it in 2017, as American readers, newly anxious about their own institutions, read it for reasons beyond Russia and put it on the year's best books lists; the National Book Award that November honored both the reporting and the theoretical ambition of reviving totalitarianism as a live category. Nemtsov's 2015 assassination had already given the book its ending. The full scale invasion of Ukraine five years later sent readers back to it as the diagnosis that had named the disease early, and Gessen's essays from that war continued the argument the book began, with the four lives it followed now read as the generation whose future the title had already written off.